"Before my first day at Google, a mutual friend introduced [me to Jeff] over email. So during my first week, I pinged him to grab lunch.

At the time, I had no idea who he was or anything about his stature at Google. I did notice during that first lunch, however, that people were staring at him from several tables over, while others would whisper something as they passed by our table.

As I began to cultivate more engineer friends, I came to know more about his "legend"; one such friend once exclaimed, "You had lunch with Jeff Dean?!"

Dean is such a star because Googlers widely credit his code for the blazing speed of Google search.